Page 115 of Level Up
Marie followsme up to my apartment after dinner. I didn’t invite her, but I don’t stop her, either.
She walks into the apartment like she always does, taking it all in like it’s the first time. It makes me feel self-conscious every time.
But instead of taking a seat on the couch right away, she turns to face me and opens her arms at her sides with a shrug. “Hug?”
And if that’s not the soggy paper straw that broke the camel’s back.
The floodgates are open as I rush into her arms, wrapping my own around her so hard that I briefly knock the wind out of her. I’m a sniveling mess and I know she must think I’m pathetic, but right now all I can think is that I’ve missed my sister for the past fifteen years. Maybe more.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” she asks, tucking her chin over my head even though she’s only an inch taller than I am. But I’m so hunched that it’s easy.
I nod feebly before letting go and following her to sit on the couch. Once we’re there, however, I don’t know if I can put a coherent thought together, let alone make a whole sentence.
“Is this about Damien?” She puts a reassuring hand on my back.
Yes—No. Maybe?“Sort of.” I take a steadying breath. “Well, yes, but not just about him. I mean, I don’t know if we’re okay right now, because he’s not talking to me, but also all this stuff is just making me hyper-aware of the fact that I don’t know who thefuckI am.”
“What stuff, exactly?”
I proceed to tell her about the recent Play’N drama. About everyone learning that I’mScones’s girlfriend, and then Damien getting doxxed, and people calling me out for being with him when his dad’s so awful. And I don’t know how to fix it.
“Who even got all that info on him?” Marie asks, shaking her head.
“I…don’t know for sure,” I tell her. Even though I’ve had a theory swirling in my head for the past twenty-four hours. “The only people who know his real nameandthat he’s SconesOfAyor are his friends and my friends, and none of them would do that… But—We ran into Cameron the other day, and he apparently was in a class with Damien in university and knows who he is.”
“You think he would do that?” Marie doesn’t know everything about what happened with me and Cameron, just that we were best friends for a long time and then suddenly we weren’t. I don’t have the energy to tell her everything right now—but I’m starting to feel like maybe I could tell her one day. Like maybe she would actually listen.
“I have no idea. I don’t even know if he knows SconesOfAyor exists.” I laugh mirthlessly. “But it’s hard to be anSOAplayer and not know who he is. So if Cameron watches his streams and found out thatSconesis datingme, and then saw me and Damien together…he could figure it out.”
“That’s still a shitty thing to do,” she says, horrified.
“I know, and I hope I’m wrong. Butsomebodydid it. And now we have to deal with it.”
“I can’t believe people are making such a big deal of it, though,” she adds. “Like, can’t they tell what kind of person he is from his streams? He doesn’t strike me as that kind of guy.”
“That’s the thing! He may not share personal details oridentifying information, but he is completely himself on stream,” I say emphatically. “But people are acting like they have no idea what kind of person he is, what kind of things matter to him, what his values are. And I’m worried he’s going to quit streaming, which would be terrible.”
“Quit streaming the same way you want to?” She raises an eyebrow at me, like she’s caught me in my own trap.
“You don’t get it.” I drop my face in my hands. “Everyone wants different things from me—they want more cozy games, they want fewer cozy games. They want moreStones of Ayor, they want noStones of Ayor. They want to know all about my personal life, then they want to judge me for it. I don’t know how to be the person they want me to be. The person Damien wants me to be. Should I talk about him? Should I ignore the comments? I have no freaking clue!”
“Forget who anyone else wants you to be, for a second,” she says, firmly holding me by the shoulder. “All you can do is be you, to the best of your ability.”
“But I don’t know who that is.”
“Yes, you do, Audrey.” She looks so serious when she says it. “You’ve always known who you are. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been authentically yourself, to the best of your ability. You didn’t abandon the things you loved just so the cool kids would like you. And you realized within a year that you were in a relationship that wasn’t making you happy—some of us spend nearly a decade in a situation like that. Because we’re too afraid to figure out who we are.”
“You mean… You were never happy with Josh?” I ask, though I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about this. We haven’t talked about it since she told me they broke up.
She lowers her hand and her head, tucking a strand of light hair behind her ear. “I thought Ishouldbe happy with him, and that was the best I could hope for,” she says. “On paper, he was great. And I did like him, in a way. But I got tired ofhiding parts of myself to fit what I thought people wanted from me.”
I watch her swallow a lump in her throat. “Hiding what?”
“You know that I played on our old N64 for years before you were old enough to use it,” she replies with a small smile. “And your Gameboy Color was mine first.”
“Yeah, but. I thought you grew out of those. Lost interest in games.”
“When I started middle school, the girls I hung out with thought games weretoo nerdy, or whatever, so I stopped playing. I didn’t tell anyone about the fantasy books I had hidden under my bed, either.”
